I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

Twitter's Diversity Numbers And The Mystery Of Black Twitter

I find myself getting very confused in this ongoing series of arguments and revelations about how white and male Silicon Valley seems to be. Companies are being castigated, castigating themselves even, for things that aren’t really under their control. Perhaps it’s simply because I’m not American and therefore am observing a culture different than my own. But then I see the arguments being made about “Black TwitterTwitter” and find myself not just confused but perplexed. For the evidence being offered is the very refutation of the contention being made. This isn’t a cultural matter, this is a logical error.

The latest installment of this is Twitter releasing their workforce diversity numbers:

We are keenly aware that Twitter is part of an industry that is marked by dramatic imbalances in diversity — and we are no exception.

By becoming more transparent with our employee data, open in dialogue throughout the company and rigorous in our recruiting, hiring and promotion practices, we are making diversity an important business issue for ourselves.

Well, OK, if that’s what you want to worry about then worry away. There are aspects of this that don’t surprise me in the slightest. As Simon Baron Cohen has been pointing out for years there’s a significant correlation between aptitude at engineering and the autism spectrum so it’s no surprise that men are over-represented in both not just the one. And the appalling state of urban schools (not to say the disproportionate effect of the idiocy known as the War on Drugs) means that largely urban African Americans are going to have difficulties entering a profession like software coding. I certainly would support action to aid people caught in those two traps. As a matter of basic fairness of course we should try to remove handicaps that the shape and or structure of society put in the way of peoples’ ability to maxmise their potential.

But the idea that a workforce should reflect either gender or ethnic make up of its customer base seems to me to be a delusion of a very different type. And when we start to discuss this “Black Twitter” idea this becomes clear:

Jackson argues that improving Twitter’s diversity isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also a good business decision. It turns out that “Black Twitter” isn’t just a meme. According to a recent Pew survey, 22 percent of African-American internet users are on Twitter, while only 16 percent of White internet users tweet. Meanwhile, usage of Facebook, LinkedInLinkedIn, and GoogleGoogle+ is roughly the same between Blacks and Whites.

In short, Twitter might make more money by hiring more people who reflect its audience. “There is no talent deficit, there’s an opportunity deficit,” Jackson said in a press release responding to Twitter’s data. “When everyone is ‘in,’ everyone wins.”

That, as Spock kept telling Kirk, is illogical. Twitter has a greater market penetration among African Americans than it does in the general population and as the diversity numbers for the Twitter workforce show there’s nary a single person blessed with melanin enhancement in that workforce. This does not tell us that it is necessary to have a particular ethnic structure to the workforce in order to be able to gain custom from some ethnicity within the population. In fact it’s telling us exactly the opposite. In fact, what the numbers are telling us is that Twitter has fewer African Americans yet is more successful in appealing to African Americans. So this argument really cannot be used in the manner that it is being used, to argue that Twitter must therefore hire more African Americans.

There’s no particular reason, even in theory, to think that a workforce must match the customer base. The potato farmers of Idaho are, I’m reasonably certain, distressingly pallid in appearance but no one is going around insisting that the French fry industry is going to collapse unless diversity increases there. And it gets even worse when you start to consider matters at a finer level of detail. The scrapbookers over at Pinterest skew very much more female than the coders at GitHub do. Should the two companies therefore has different gender profiles in their workforce? That’s where this sort of insistence will take us.

There are indeed very real problems with both gender and ethnicity in various workforces right across the nation. Those should indeed be addressed: most notably in the education system. But the insistence that Twitter, or any other producer of anything at all, must have a workforce that reflects the makeup of the customer base is simply wrong. The very example used to make the argument, that Black Twitter one that shows that the company is more successful among African Americans than other internet services while it also has a more lilywhite workforce than those others, is the very proof that the contention is wrong.

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